Mobile application development in .NET

by: Rohit Photo: irange.net As the usage of Mobile Devices is increasing in current generation of computing, intuitive and advance mobile applications are becoming need of the day. Microsoft .Net Compact Framework provides an intelligent framework to develop client applications for smart devices like Pocket PC etc..Net Compact Framework is powered with ease of usability just as Microsoft has delivered with other development environments. One of the best thing about .NET Compact framework is the capability to bring managed code to mobile devices like memory management, security etc..NET Compact Framework is one of the most popular platforms used for developing mobile applications. There are several advantages of .NET Compact Framework which are as follows:Net Framework developers can rapidly develop applications for mobile devices without much training, thereby reducing the training and development cost.The same IDE (Visual Studio .NET IDE) is used for develop and deploy the application like any other application. i.e. web application.Mobile application automatic gets deployed while executing the application first time.Have capability to call web service or communicate through SOAPIt gets the core benefit of garbage collector and compiler like any other .NET applicationsSame mobile application can be run on different mobile devices without recompilation as long as they support .NET Compact Framework.The .NET Compact Framework is actually a subset of the .NET Framework and hence shares many components with software development on desktop clients, application servers, and web servers which have the .NET Framework installed. Let us see the difference between Compact VS Desktop .NET FrameworkApplication Testing: Unlike normal .NET application where variety of unit testing tools available likes NUnit, MBUnit, xUnit.Net, or MSTest for .NET Compact Framework there is only one tool available which is MSTest. MSTest is still not that much advanced tool for unit testing but it does its job.COM interoperability: A big difference is that there is no COM interoperability, which means the compact CLR does not have the COM marshaler from .NET which can translate inbound and outbound calls between .NET objects and COM objects. Windows CE supports COM and this limitation of .NET Compact Framework makes it difficult for your mobile code to 'talk' to mobile COM libraries, such as the Pocket Outlook Object Model (POOM).NET Remoting: This is another big limitation that is the lack of a .NET Remoting infrastructure to perform remote calls to server-side objects over HTTP or TCP/IP using binary or SOAP formatters. This is again because of size considerations since the Remoting infrastructure is fairly heavy on system resources.Late binding: There is no support for late binding in .NET Compact Framework (e.g. As Object in VB.NET)Reflection: There is no reflection emit (System.Reflection.Emit), which means you won't be able to compile code at run-time to create IL (Intermediate Language) assemblies dynamically. About Author: Rohit Chopra is a veteran in IT industry with a focus on offshore software development India(extendcode.com). Rohit has enabled solutions for Health Care, HR and Media verticals and written article on mobile application development for offshore software development company. Article Source: BestToRead.com